A coach practicing a track team needs to calculate many times during the day split times for his athletes. In practicing for a running event, individuals usually workout by running several spits with short periods of rest in between. A split is a short distance that the individual runs. Usually the coach wishes the athlete to run several splits at the same pace. For example a coach wanted a runner to run a five thousand meter race in 15 minutes. For this race he wants to know how fast the runner needs to run each four hundred meter (one circuit of the average track) split or distance. Thus, the coach would need to calculate the number of times four hundred meters goes into five thousand meters. Then he would need to divide that number into 15 minutes, to find how fast his runner would need to run each four hundred meter split. This is a time consuming chore.
The only technology on the market today to help with this chore is a slide rule type of device. With this device the calculation of split times is still time consuming and the rule is difficult to operate. The end objective of this invention is to develop a simple device that can quickly calculate split times for runner. The inventor does this by creating a hand held device in which only the race distance, split distance, and time for achieving the race distance is entered and the hand held device calculates the split time.
The hand held device is also designed to solve another problem. This problem is that a coach has to calculate the split times for many athletes, many of whom will be in more than one event. Further, he must keep track of each athlete's times over the period of time he is coaching that athlete. Thus, another objective of the invention is to allow a coach to calculate split times and keep track of these times for several different athletes. The inventor has achieved this by developing a hand held device with a memory in which the names of each runner can be placed as well as his split times.
Coaches often wished to be able to time their athletes as well as see the split time that the athlete should be running. This enables the coach to yell to his runner to speed up or slow down or tell his runner that he is on pace. Thus one of the objectives of this invention is to be able to time a runner while he is running. To meet this objective, the inventor has placed a stopwatch within the hand held device. The ease of using this device over the previous technology can be seen through the use of this stopwatch. By being able to pull up the split time for his runner and by timing of the runner with the stopwatch on the device's screen the coach can see if his runner is on pace.
The device can be either a hand held calculator, a smart phone, or a tablet system, such as an iPad.